Carpe Libra

The Shepherd, the Angel, and Walter the Christmas Miracle Dog, by Dave Barry.
I read this book back in September, and I strongly recommend you find it and read it right away. It's short — only 117 pages with illustrations — and can be read in an hour. It's touching and hilarious and, if you're [...]

Here's a couple items of interest… well, they were of interest to me, anyway. No need to be interested if you have other things on your mind.  
Vocab Workout: I just spent (wasted?) loads of time on the Free Rice site. For each vocab word you answer correctly, 10 grains of rice are donated through [...]

While watching the college football season wind down, cheering for Miami to beat Boston College for reasons too complex to explain here, I, for some reason, started thinking about the Boston Pilgrims, winners of the first World Series against the Pittsburg(h) Pirates.  Or so I thought.  Apparently, the Boston Pilgrims didn't exist.  If you're a baseball fan who's [...]

If you are interested, you can read about my very exciting visit to Plimouth Plantation, Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower on my blog.

I didn't want to do another post about music, mainly because I didn't think it matched the pilgrim theme.  But, other than the Mayflower, I don't know much about pilgrims, so I went back to music and found what appears to be a nice collection of songs that fit in nicely with this month's theme.  I'm not necessarily [...]

This site has all sorts of information on the passengers on the Mayflower. You can click on the names for biographical information. Check out John Howland in particular. He was a servant of the governor. During a storm on the voyage, he was swept overboard but somehow managed to grab a rope and was pulled [...]

In 1976, a French director strapped a camera to the front of his car and drove like mad through the streets of Paris to meet the woman he loved.
The Paris police had refused him permission, so he got up early one morning and did it anyway, ignoring traffic signals, cars, buses and pedestrians. The film [...]

"On the Mayflower", written by Kate Waters is the story of the Mayflower voyage told from the view of the ship's young apprentice, William Small.  Will Small's fictional character is based on facts about the lives of ships' apprentices at that time. In this book, he befriends a young pilgrim girl named Ellen Moore.  Ellen [...]

This history of the Plymouth Plantation colony from 1620 to 1647 was written by the governor, William Bradford. It includes the years the Pilgrims spent in the Netherlands, the Mayflower voyage, relations with Indians, struggles to find food, the growth of the colony and dealings (often frustrating) with agents in England. It gets a bit [...]

This book covers (briefly) the Pilgrim's departure from England through their arrival in Plymouth (1620) to King Philip's War (1675-1676). The war was the most destructive war in U.S. history based on the percentage of the population. Eight% of the white adult male population died (compared to 4.5% in the Civil War) and somewhere around 70% [...]